For a long time government and law enforcement agencies have forced organizations and various companies to weaken their security encryptions to enable the agencies access such information anytime they need to use it. It may be a good way to access sensitive that would expose criminals through encrypted information but it also endangers the use of the organizationsâ protected information by unauthorized persons. The encryption backdoor may be a good way to stop terrorism but may highly risk confidential information to cyber-attacks.
What is encryption backdoor?
Encryption backdoor is way in which a weakness is allowed on the encrypted data to allow government officials gain access to it. The encryption backdoors exists in various forms with some of the methods allowing government agencies to create and distribute the encryption keys on their own to the technological companies or rather the organizations while retaining the description keys to gain access to the confidential information at any time.
Essentially the government will retain some of the description keys to unlock the encrypted files whenever they need to access any information on such files.
Type of encryption backdoors
There are quite a range of encryptions that different companies may consider whenever they need to protect their data from access by unauthorized persons. Most at times the encryption is performed on the servers. Such forms of encryption may not be very secure and therefore it may easily be decrypted hence allowing unauthorized persons to access such data.
A very secure type of encryption is the end-to end encryption where the data or the information being safeguarded is encrypted before it is released on the servers. Only the receipts of such information can gain access to such information and hence it may not be easy to descript it not unless the persons accessing the data have the decryption keys.
On the end-to-end description only the sender and the recipient have the ability to read the messages. Therefore the government nor the services provider can have access to such information. The inability to access such information therefore forces the government officials to use the encryption backdoor to access the intended information.
Why encryption backdoors are risky
If someone has access to the master key to unlock the encrypted information then you cannot be sure that the protected information is safe. The encryption backdoors compromises the protected data hence risking the attack by the cyber-attacks threats. The hackers are not the only people who can wrongly access your sensitive information. The government officials who gain access to the decryption keys are also a threat to your encrypted files. Some agencies may even use your confidential data for harm.
The Encryption Backdoor is thus a great threat to an organizationâs confidential information. It provides a way for unauthorized individuals to access the company information. The encryption backdoor system greatly jeopardizes the security of the encrypted information and it may be important to find a better way to solving such problems. an end-to-end encryption is highly recommended to secure an organizations information but however the policy, makers also need to find an effective way of understanding the risk that organizations are exposed to, while availing the description keys to the government agencies.
